Roadmaps vs. north stars
For a product manager, or anyone else tasked with setting the direction for a team, the roadmap is a familiar artifact. It lays out your plans and highlights key projects, deliverables, and metrics to move.
Just like actual maps or GPS, product roadmaps are great when you have an accurate picture of where you are and where you want to go. But if you’re in an unfamiliar city or — god forbid — in the woods with no cell reception, maps and GPS quickly become useless. Similarly, product roadmaps are not an effective tool to guide your team through areas of ambiguity.
Roadmaps are inherently linked to a specific set of circumstances. They are brittle to changes in the market landscape and do not allow for flexibility when dealing with unforeseen obstacles.
How did explorers in bygone eras get around? They used the stars. Unlike maps, stars always help you find your goal. No matter what the terrain — rockslides, flooded rivers, etc. — you are free to improvise your immediate path while still making long term progress in a certain direction. When starting a new company, entering a new market, or in some way embarking into unfamiliar territory, you should be using north stars, not roadmaps.
North stars represent a general direction vector rather than a particular point on the map. North stars express principles and values that can help clarify difficult decisions instead of prescribing specific results. This allows you to guide your product even as it goes through short term transformations.
As your team executes, you will generate many roadmaps based on your north star and the current circumstances. But as you gain understanding, pivoting in the face of new challenges, you are free to scrap any specific roadmap, confident that you’re making forward progress as long as you follow your north star.
What is a north star?
A north star is a description of the world you hope to achieve. It codifies
- Principles that must hold true in such a world
- Areas your team needs to understand in order to be effective
- Goals that must necessarily conflict, and how to make trade-offs between them
Just like the real North Star, the world you describe isn’t necessarily reachable. But moving towards that vision will bring you towards a better real world location.
North stars in practice
The Chrome Web Platform team (where I work) recently started a cross-cutting effort called platform predictability to reduce developer pain when building for the web. To get the effort going, we wrote a north star.
The world we hope to achieve is “the web should just work for developers”. This is ultimately what value the project will bring.
In this world, we believe that the following must be true:
- Developers only worry about what features are available, never what browser they’re running on.
- Over the years, all features trend towards universal availability or removal.
- Developers are never surprised or significantly hurt by site breakage due to a browser update.
- Common use cases are easy to get right and known bad patterns can be easily identified and avoided.
These principles will bucket our work, inspire concrete projects, and help us prioritize. So long as we are working towards these goals, we know we’re making progress even if the landscape turns out differently than we expected.
The biggest thing we need to understand is what causes pain for developers in practice. We want to cultivate an actionable, reliable feedback pipeline from web developers.
We also highlight that ease of use may be in conflict with cross-browser support. In these cases we favor cross browser support.
You’ll notice that throughout the predictability north star we avoided concrete projects and numbers as much as possible. Where they are mentioned, they are used primarily as clarifying examples rather than commitments.
Summary
When starting something new in uncertain territory, write north stars before you write roadmaps. North stars codify things that need to hold true eventually. They emphasize areas of understanding that you need to grow. They prepare you to make difficult tradeoffs. They also keep you flexible as you discover what the problem landscape looks like.
North stars are a great way to make sure your team is in alignment and making forward progress no matter how unfamiliar the terrain.
